Part 12 Answers #2
Right outside the window.
A little wheeled delivery robot.
Arriving.
I grabbed Hooper by the lapels and, diving quickly, pulled him over the counter as the delivery robot outside exploded.
The blast shook the whole building.
In a single shocking instant, the little robot delivery cart just blew apart in a violent eruption of fire and smoke and the entire front window of the office shattered, sending a storm of glass shards rocketing inside.
The two armed FBI agents were hurled fully six feet through the air. They went slamming into the side walls.
Xiao was also blown off his feet, but since he’d been facing the street, his face was shredded by the hailstorm of razor-sharp shards.
He was thrown backwards through the air and slammed into the receptionist’s counter—the one I had dived over with Hooper in the nick of time.
Xiao slammed into the counter so hard, it splintered and cracked, and Xiao slumped to the ground.
The receptionist was okay.
I’d clipped her as I’d dived over her counter with Hooper and she’d tumbled to the floor beside us.
Gasping, she hurried over to the older grey-haired Chinese gentleman who’d also been thrown back by the blast. His head had hit a desk and he now lay on the floor, bleeding.
‘Comrade Chang!’ the receptionist gasped. ‘Are you hurt?’
Outside, onlookers screamed.
Others were beginning to peer curiously in through the now-shattered front window.
Hooper groaned beside me. Unprepared for my desperate evasive dive, he’d landed awkwardly, hitting his head.
I heard sirens.
The fire department and NYPD would be here soon.
I hauled myself up, brushed off the glass shards.
‘You aren’t . . . going anywhere . . . Speedman . . .’ Hooper groaned from beside me, fumbling for his gun.
I couldn’t believe I’d saved this jerk’s life.
‘Yes I am,’ I said. ‘See, I’m not done yet. When the cops and your boss get here, why don’t you take credit for my work again and tell them why Xiao was at this location and also why he has a gunshot wound to his left hand. Tell them all you know about Modern Alchemical Solutions.’
‘What?’ Hooper said.
I stepped over him, heading for the door.
A pained moan made me stop and spin.
Xiao lay on the floor, his face and the whole front of his body a ragged mess of blood and flesh from all the shards that had struck him.
He was in a bad way. I wasn’t sure he’d survive.
He was trying to say something. To me.
I knelt over the Chinese detective.
‘We did . . . use . . . Modern Alchemical Solutions . . .’ he gasped. ‘The man from there . . . He is . . . ruthless . . . He will . . . certainly . . .’—Xiao chuckled as he choked on his own blood—‘. . . kill you. Ha-ha-ha-ha!’
I stood and left, sweeping out onto the street and hurrying away as the first cop cars and FDNY trucks arrived at the other end of the laneway.
I hailed the first cab I saw.
‘Where to?’ the driver asked.
‘Are you okay with a long ride? I’ll pay cash and tip you well.’
‘Hell, yeah.’
‘Southampton, out past Shinnecock Hills.’
‘Buddy, you know that’ll be at least three hundred bucks on the meter?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
A MANSION IN THE HAMPTONS
Southampton
Long Island, NY
30 December
The cab ride took over two hours, cruising up the Long Island Expressway all the way to the South Fork.
As I sat in the back seat, I made some calls on my burner phone.
First, I rang Audrey to see how she was doing.
‘Much better,’ she said. ‘Heidi’s been taking great care of me.’
‘Hey, little man!’ Heidi called from the background.
Audrey said, ‘Sam, what the hell happened with you and Trey? Something in Chinatown? The FBI have ordered me to come in immediately and they’re full-on hunting for you now.’
‘Can you put me on speaker, please?’
She did and I quicky told her and Heidi about everything that had happened since I’d left them two nights ago: Aristo King’s invitation to his drone base and the drone attack on the way back, Xiao and the Chinese, Modern Alchemical Solutions, the mysteri-ous plaintext, my chat with the Unperson, King’s collection of sex tapes, including some with his first wife, Winnie Tan, and, last of all, my encounter with the real Quinn McCade at Sinclair & Loewe Insurance.
When I was finished, Heidi said, ‘Surgically altered imposters, bad darknet companies, drone attacks. Little man, why oh why do you dig so deep . . . fuuuuck.’
‘Jesus,’ Audrey said. ‘Where are you now?’
‘I’m heading to Southampton to interview Winnie Tan at her home.’
‘Winnie Tan?’ Heidi said. ‘What makes you possibly think she’ll let you in to see her?’
‘I think she’ll see me,’ I said. ‘And the way I see it, right now, the only way for me to get out of all this without getting arrested by the FBI is to solve the whole damned thing, so that’s what I’m gonna do.’
‘Be careful, Sam,’ Audrey said.
We hung up.
I still had about thirty minutes left to travel.
I extracted my photos of the plaintext Monty Woods had pulled from Modern Alchemical Solutions’ communications with its three unknown clients.
I gazed at the middle paragraph with its heavily corrupted text, still undeciphered:
I called Monty Woods.
He picked up on the second ring.
‘Hey, Monty, any luck with that corrupted paragraph of text?’
‘I’m close,’ he said. ‘I wrote it all out on another standalone computer and am trying a new algorithm on it right now. But it’s slow. It’s literally processing as we speak. Hoping I’ll crack it sometime today.’
‘Please call me as soon as you get something.’
‘Copy that. Hey, Sam, you, er, didn’t happen to be in Chinatown today? Like, when that explosion went off? It’s all over the news.’
‘Might have been.’
‘Hot damn, I love you, dude! You are so hardcore! Don’t forget I want you to set me up on a date, if you don’t end up dead in all this. Talk later.’
He rang off.
I looked out the window of my cab.
Since I still had a short way to go, I figured I’d take a stab at the tricky paragraph, see if I could make anything of it.
I started at the beginning.
It began with ‘4071AY’ again.
The leader at Modern Alchemical Solutions, the Unperson.
I scanned the first five lines:
I rewrote it with spaces and punctuation, deleting the random 0s and 1s:
4071AY: NEED YOU THERE TO BE ****************OOF WITH *******
4633QQ: YOU WON’T ****************
4071AY: YOU’LL BE EXTRACTED UPON PAYMENT. SHE WON’T. IT WI************DOUBLE CROSSE****
4633QQ: OK. I’LL BE THERE.
4071AY: YOU WILL HAVE SATISFACTION.
12/20/26
4071AY: OVERALL RIDDLE HOL
The Unperson had been telling his client—4633QQ—that he needed them ‘to be there’.
The client replied, ‘You won’t . . .’
Then the Unperson said the client would be extracted upon payment while someone else—a woman—wouldn’t.
And then something about a double-cross.
‘You will be extracted on payment.’
Of what?
A ransom?
I tried to think of who, on December 21st, had been freed upon the payment of a ransom when someone else hadn’t.
Not the bodyguard who’d been suspended from underneath the express elevator.
The fake Quinn McCade—the Unperson himself impersonating the insurance executive—had said the Kidnapping & Ransom policy only applied to Aristo King’s family members.
(That exchange now took on a whole new awful complexion. The Unperson had probably enjoyed allowing the poor bodyguard to die.)
Not the boy Alexei.
The fake Quinn McCade—the Unperson again—had dissembled and delayed for so long that Ms Kimura had been forced to pay Alexei’s ransom of $40 million from Aristo King’s own funds. And the boy hadn’t been freed. He’d been dropped anyway, to be caught by me.
When Ajax and Cassandra had been attached to the outside of the windows of the 73rd floor, there was no ransom paid, and McCade—the Unperson—had been nowhere to be found.
(Now I knew that the Unperson had been up on the roof at that time, placing Winnie Tan and Yasmina in the FBI helicopter, presumably with his accomplice, the fake Lenny Grossman, after they had ruthlessly gunned down all the cops and bodyguards in the penthouse with their silenced machine guns.)
But a ransom had been paid later . . .
‘You’ll be extracted upon payment. She won’t.’
. . . a ransom that had seemingly been paid by the Unperson posing as Quinn McCade, supposedly on behalf of the insurance company . . .
. . . for Winnie Tan.
And she’d been released, even though—as I now knew—there had been no insurance company on the other end of the Unperson’s phone.
‘She won’t’ must have been a reference to Yasmina, who wasn’t ransomed.
Which would mean . . .
I was nearing the end of my long taxi ride.
My cab passed a couple of golf courses: Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and the National Golf Links of America. Private clubs. High-end. Exclusive.
The cab turned onto Millstone Brook Road.
It was a long, shoulderless road that cut through the forests and swamps of this part of Southampton.
There were few cars.
At length, we came to a side road that branched left off Millstone Brook Road, heading north.
It was a tight lane called Northwest Neck Road that went for about a mile or so.
There was only one house on this road and the single narrow tree-lined laneway was the only way in or out.
That house—or rather, mansion—belonged to Aristo King’s first ex-wife, Winnie Tan.
The cab ride ended up costing me $344.
I paid the driver in cash and tipped him another hundred bucks and he drove away happy.
I pressed the call button on the gate.
‘Yes?’ a curt voice answered through the speaker.
‘My name’s Sam Speedman. I’m a private detective. I’d like to speak to Ms Tan about what happened at 59West last week.’
‘Ms Tan already issued a public statement about that and will not speak further about it. Good day—’
‘Tell her I’d like to discuss the affair she’s been having with her ex-husband, Aristo King,’ I said. ‘I have video evidence.’
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
Bzzzz-click.
The gate beside me unlocked and opened by itself.
I stepped through and the automated gate swung shut behind me.
I’d only taken a few steps up the pebbled drive when my burner phone rang.